The little woman is in a hut of many hare-bones, and her mate is gathering sticks with everyone else. They have given him felts all red and brown, and skins, and furs of brush rabbit in his boots. And so he goes through the snow, padded and quiet as they are but at his ankles he still smells to we leverets who watch in the shadows like a longed-for place across that sad Valley, a longed-for ocean, which we do not know about except in the Moon as it pulls and pushes at our mothers, our sisters, our wives, and those tides of new ones, pink and soft-eared, flooding the grassy alpine meadows each May.
All the sticks the People and the freckled man carry on their backs are heaped onto a fire to keep the little mother warm in the snow, in the hut of hare-doe bones where she, sleeping, dreams. Those dreams touch the bones of hares gutted, skinned and consumed. We watching leverets catch scraps of her dreams, of a Mother with Wheels for feet, a great web like a Tent above the trees, a long, long Valley of broken cement and the smell of sad houses, and a barren dusty place where strawberries once grew where the little baby was made. In her mate, we leverets see long tunnels underground, and a lost father in him, and a love for the little mother who he saw born in the buckeye when he was nine.
It is the longest night of the year. Upon it we leverets watch this small woman call out once the word ‘Wheel’ as her waters break and the People gathering sticks stop and come near. From behind us, a hand comes grabbing, the hand of a middle-aged woman in blue felts and fingers dyed black from oak galls, dark eyes and the lilt of the Valley of her great-grandmothers.
‘Come here, mamí,’ she hisses as she picks up our sister by the neck, sweetly, like she is a gift. ‘Venga, venga, it is her time, and you must help her. You’ve got her story in your womb, you know this?’
The rest of us run away as the new little mother is rubbed with the soft ears of the yearling doe and fed her blood. The birth begins. Behind us, we leave wide leaping prints in the snow, and a trail of droppings which have blue-dusted bits of juniper berries in them.
A berry and a seed passing through a body know all the things that body in that time, in those hours, knows. The body of a chewing creature—this I need, my alchemists, my magicians: the guts and the colons of the Ones Who Have Teeth.
*
And the smoke of burned windfall, my arms: this also knows that which it touches. So I can tell you in wisps a memory that comes now, little boy-child clutching your arms around your chest, little child who knows what it is I say. I will tell you a memory too of my smoke so sweet and hot that first night, when Anja gave birth and Martin was made to sit among strangers while his love screamed, because no men were allowed near. So he sat by the fire of my branches, ready to burst. I liked him because his hands gathering wood grasped each piece tenderly knowing it was alive, or had been, acknowledging some preciousness. This is the sign of a good man to an old Juniper who has seen so many, many centuries. An old Juniper who has drunk up the bits of poison fallen from the thick clouds. Hands that, despite the world, examined each new fallen piece happily, like it was a small present. His hands had love for that woman Anja all over them. The smoke from the fire of my branches touched his hair and his cheeks rough with beard, his layers of scrappy pant and coat—denim rags, nettle spun, rough wool. My smoke got underneath to his skin and his chest, down his nose and into his lungs and there, there was the thing they had carried up to the sharp mountains where the Snow Melts and Makes Rivers.
My smoke touched something in his chest that had been carried, like a tinderbundle wrapped with the dark green seaweed of their coast: they had wanted to bring the Word. Missionaries—that’s what they carried up through the snow, shaking with hypothermia. Missionaries—a concept as old as candlesticks. The salmon told me about it long long ago—spawning as they once did upstream, all the way up here, with adobe missions, Fathers, Priests, Confessions, smudged into their bones. It was a concept wept into the streams by the neophytes who before were Miwok, Paiute, Wintun, Pomo, Ohlone. Yes, this concept I had heard of, one kind of people saying to another people—your roots are all wrong, your branches don’t grow right. Here, our roots, they are Right, our branches, they are True. That’s the only way I can explain it, see? Martin, beside the fire, he had that desire in his chest, and Anja did too—a thing they had built their love around, he following her as she Went on her Journey, she called it, to tell other people the Way.
Beside this thing that they had carried, there was also, near Martin’s heart, the memory of a small man and a Chinook made of glossy wood and dirt, and this made me generous again to him, for that little man knew all about what my roots know all about, and that wooden salmon knew of water, and the line between up here and down there, written into her bones like it is into the bones of all fish.
All my smoke in his lungs made Martin cough, and the People handed him clear snowmelt water to soothe it. In his coughing I saw torch-fires lit and carried underground. I saw the steep hills and alder valleys and beach cliffs and lupine-touched meadows of that place of ragged wilderness near the big Bay. I saw those places filled with the smoke of madness, the smoke of burning Tool Sheds, burning Camps, burning balls and bells the Fools who carried the nightmares of the world had been made to dance with.
My smoke in him opened that other smoke, its own nightmare: how they waited underground, eating worms brought to them by the broad-footed moles, eating the roots of dandelions and stray carrot patches, braiding each other’s hair into elaborate towers out of pure panic, needing to keep from losing their own minds, too. The little man made of the thumb bone of St. Francis of Assisi told stories from places that seemed to those Fools (who had been called and coaxed underground to Burn the Camps by the Wheeling Roundness of Wheel, by the beauty of Ffion, by the mad avian-architecture of Iris) like other planets in time and space: dusty missions made of clay and wattle and surrounded by the white lowing of long-horned cattle, stone hermitages in dry places with blue hot seas nearby and wild spiced herbs in the hills thick with silvery olive trees where men made careful calligraphy in books in a language as old as my very body—2,000 years—and meanwhile fermented cheeses. The one sweetness of that time underground, in Martin’s memory, was those stories—he was the only little boy amidst all the Fools who time had battered.
My smoke moved past that underground in him and onward, in the oxygen in his breath, moving all through his limbs to flush his blood, and there, as in the visions of the leverets who knew the dreams of Anja, I saw the web-tent of Wheel. It was perfect tranquility, a ship drifting above the world, away from the cinders, the char. On it leapt a littler Anja, always climbing down and coming up again with checkerbloom flowers, with wild irises, paintbrush, creamcups, farewell to spring, tucked into the close-shedding stubble of her dark green hair.
There—my smoke touched it, the deepest thing in Martin’s chest. A soft memory in his heart where brotherly love was always a small blue seed buried and ready to grow into a man’s love for a woman, since the moment that reeling girl was born and held up to the world in the branches of the Buckeye.
Anja always sat beside him by the fires they lit up in Wheel’s Webs, in that treetop Court of Fools where everybody had gathered who was afraid to go down quite yet, for fear that it had not worked, for fear that one Master and a Tool Shed existed still, and would contrive to chain each last one of them. Hand them a new set of polished stones to juggle and juggle, as if their strangeness, their “deformity,” would keep the rest of the devils of the world at bay.
There, my smoke touched it—a particular fire when Martin was twenty-four and Anja fifteen. Martin was about to leave the paradise of the web-Court, towered, tented, strung with the blue twisting feathers of jays, wood-peckers, lemon-yellow warblers, for the Ground, to seek his father.
With my smoke in his chest and the swallow of snowmelt in an aspen-wood cup from strangers, his Anja screaming the birth of a child, Martin remembered that night when he first learned that he loved her, and would always.
By tha
t treetop fire of his memory, she was warming her hands, long skinny fingers, a little crooked, and eating a dove egg with a small wooden spoon. Between bites she tried to mimic the cooing of doves. Lips pursed in an O. She did it perfectly, and grinned at him.
“Wonder what I said,” she laughed, and swallowed more egg. “Hope not some kind of dove come-on. Watch them all come landing on my shoulders, turning to handsome pale little men. Would you fight them off for me, Martin?” Her tone curled and unfurled, a tapping of glee in it, and also that higher note of a womanly sort of wile. Martin realized she was flirting with him. Not teasing like a little girl, but flirting, expertly. Where had she learned it? Her eyelashes seemed very long, and sly, pale as moonlight. Martin found himself blushing, and Anja reached her hand to touch that redness.
“Ooh, jealous, Martin?” she laughed again, tossed her eggshell far, for the raccoons. “A princess may have many suitors you know. As my body guard you’ll have to fight them off. Unless of course I like one of them.” She ran her hands through her hair—luxurious and long, since it was spring. Robust, almost black, with that hint of green.
“Always,” Martin managed, going along with the joke, pretending to make a flourish and a bow. He felt choked, all of a sudden flushed with sadness—that he hadn’t told her of his leaving—but how could he? He would never be able to leave if she begged him not too. He was sad that by the supple fire, full of sweet fir boughs, Anja looked like she had walked right out of an old skin, and he hadn’t noticed until he was about to leave. Even her lips seemed darker, fuller, as well as her breasts when she moved to stoke the embers and they swelled slightly, small but high, at the neck of her ragged yellow dresses, tucked over boxy brown pants. Underneath all those random layers he hadn’t realized until now that she had shifted, become a new creature, as different in his eyes as a tadpole to a red-legged frog. Suddenly her fullness filled up the whole night, and he wanted to cup her face in his two hands, smell the roots of her hair dark as buckeye humus, put his lips upon her.
She caught his looking as she sat down again, reaching into her pocket for her polished gambling nuts—once, beyond the Web but still in the fir tops, several sisters, squirrel-women with long, thick tails and large teeth, had kidnapped her for a day, but she had learned their gambling tricks in an afternoon and out-betted them—five smooth hazelnuts, rippled, bronze, in her palm. A dart of knowing went through her, at his eyes. She put the nuts away and went silent, startled.
The next morning, Martin, who had stayed awake all night thinking of Anja, telling himself it was indecent to love her, being almost her older brother, climbed down from the firs and did not return for two years. When he did return at last, no father to be found, Anja herself had left.
“A Mission, she has a Mission. Got it in her head after you left. Her Mission,” said Wheel. “Lonely child,” she added, “some heartbreak”—a knowing look. Martin, he could do nothing but follow.
I have grown my bark slowly around the whispers she left, around the blue of my berries she tucked into these xylum folds, each seed with a bit of her story in it, proud like I was once when I was younger, suppler, no fire yet at my trunk, no storm to split me.
Take seven of these berries she tucked here, put them in your small silver pot. It is lined with the stories of the past now, and ready to carry Anja. Light a fire under it—yes, in here, in me. I am not afraid any longer of flame. They must be a right soup before they will release any telling to you. No more than seven—none of us is allowed the whole story, child, and I certainly can’t tell it all. Only scraps of her, and of Martin, remain easy for me to find. There are thousands of others having their lives around me—bighorn sheep, black bears, rattlesnakes, night stars, columbine flowers, white pines, goshawks, hares, and all of that is in me too. I am not so partial.
I GATHERED BRUSH OUTSIDE IN THE NIGHT. THE HOOTING OF spotted owls filled up the thin air, dry in my throat. My head was full, a night sky moving. I used the windfall of the Juniper. I made my fire inside small. I swept any stray popping ember back in. The smoke seemed to well straight up, further than I could see of her trunk, out the old holes made by woodpeckers.
From under the dust blue of her thick dress she pulled out two small cups, burls, and gestured for me to pour. What came out of that coffeepot was thick and steaming, with smells of resin and dirt and something delicious, like roasted nuts. It was blue. Sky blue.
“I have a soft spot for her I suppose, just a very small one,” said the old Juniper. Her voice crept and curled around me, ringing and ringing the roads of her weatherlines. “Her father was a tree after all.”
She lifted the cup to my cup—cheers, she murmured. We drank, and we became Anja’s Seven Memories, stored there like diaries in the 2,000-year old xylum. I suppose, more accurately, she, across the fire, became Anja’s Seven Memories, all weathered in her own smoke, and I listened so eagerly they may as well have been in me. She spoke them with her eyes closed and her teeth gleaming, and when she spoke it was another voice entirely, a woman’s, human. I sat, hot, stomach turning and turning with that blue drink. I saw her, Anja. I swear it. I saw her at the same time as the old Juniper crooned out her berry-sung voice. I saw her around or over that woman like a sheath made of cobwebs, a glimpse of her with each memory. A young Anja first, not much older than me, all skinny and glowing, hair a velvet dandelion-spun halo, wearing the red felts these mountain people wear, weeping, ashamed; a much older Anja, silvered, grown wide like a tree grows, ears hung with a dozen small bones gilded gold. Glimpses, only, but I tell you I loved her all through. I understood Martin. I understood Bells, Perches, and Boots. I understood all of you, for your crooning adoration. And your eyes have not even touched her.
I think it made me become a human person finally and all the way through. Hearing her, seeing her, grew that organ in me which makes a person a person—the Organ of Sorrow. And not for the reason you think—not because Anja was an Angel, a goddess come to the mountain peak to bear her holy child and convert the ones who lived there. Not because I was seized with some religious fervor, but because I came to feel pity for another, to feel her griefs, to feel her heart all upturned in a thousand places, letting strange light in. She taught me where my heart was—not only that it moved my blood but that it had a human mother in it. Not only Lyoobov, no, not just the gray foxes letting me sleep in their dens, but more than any of these the one who pulled me out of the ground and nursed me all my life. I saw that maybe the rest of me had been made by accident by that owl woman once called Margaret, the beast bones of Lyoobov, poppy roots, mole snouts, the magma of earth and old fox dreams, but my heart—this my mother grew in me when she pulled me up like an iris root. This, her unsheathing of me grew, right there, stronger and stronger on her milk and her kisses and her stories full of flying cars and oceans with whales still in them, cows with milk like rosemary who could prophesy the future.
This—the desire to know the future—this is a purely human desire. I can assure you, no creature ever cares to know. But we do—that’s part of what a heart is for. We look out at the stars and first feel awe, but always, after, panic, and then guilt—that we have been given Paradise, that we might fail. Again and again—what if failing is what makes us who we are? Age after age, killing off each other, or every other kind, no middle road, no path we know how to find in time. That this is the guilt you carry, and Anja at once reveals it to you and eases it; rubbing some salve on the weary shoulders of your soul. Making you weep for your mother, and the time you were small, eating wild blackberries in August with her to help you get out the thorns. Weeping for the day you could no longer let her, and had to do it yourself, and shoulder her, and your whole kind, and the world itself.
I cried. Yes, I admit it freely, I cried the whole time of Anja’s Seven Memories. I cried because I am two halves. One belongs to Lyoobov and to the foxes, but the other is yours. It is Molly’s. It is Sam’s. It Margaret’s. It is Rose’s. It is Ash’s. I, a human self who was
longed for—Poppy. What a new concept that was for me! It is easier to be one day a fox, the next a newt, to reside in their calm. To be a son—this made me cry and cry. And to know that each fox too is a son—this made me cry and cry even more. My tears went in my coffeepot and turned into Bells, into owl feathers, into Rose petals, the likes of which I’ve never seen, into Ash, into cities that sorrowed with their people, who had not wanted to destroy the very air; who wept to see the fish belly up in all the rivers, and then the birds; who wept more when the animals passed on their poisons, their sicknesses, and sons and aunts began to die too, and the cities with them. What sorrow, it is best left buried, you might say. But a Juniper—why should she have to bear it alone in all her roots? A burden, it must be shared. We must share it.
And so, here they are. The dust-blue berries. Anja’s Seven.
ONE
OH MAMA, JUNIPER MAMA, MY OWN WHEEL MAMA, I’VE BORNE NOT A baby but a pika. Seven actually, six girls, one boy, small as wild plums. I wanted so much for a baby that looked like Martin, with freckles and small pink hands. I wanted to be a normal strong woman and watch him learn to walk and stay here in the snow, circling their Road, teaching them the Ways of the Fools, and how to let the Wild Folk back in again. I wanted to be some kind of legend, I think, because I always felt like I was supposed to be one. I wanted to be the one to run through the melting spring and open each tree-door, let out the squirrel ladies with big tails for muffs and gambling nuts in their soft black coats. Surprise everyone. I’m a stupid girl, with pikas for her children. This was a completely different kind of surprise, and yet the People didn’t seem to be surprised at all, which made it perhaps worse. I suppose I am arrogant, proud, taught to think I am someone special.
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